THAT "HAS SEEN ITS DAY."
I do not know when Torsington-on-Sea's day precisely was, or, whether indeed its day has yet dawned, but I was sent there by my medical adviser as being the very place for me, it being "delightfully quiet", nine miles from a railway station, which apparently means in plain English twenty-four hours behind the rest of this habitable globe, and generally stranded in the race for every conceivable comfort or necessity with which an age of Co-operative Stores and Electric Lighting has made one comfortably—perhaps too comfortably—familiar. Judging, however, from the fact that Torsington-on-Sea consists mainly of a pretentious architectural effort consisting of six-and-thirty palatial sea-side residences, twenty-four of which are let in sets of furnished apartments to highly respectable families, and twelve of which appear, from want of funds, to have stopped short in their infancy many years ago at the basement, showing a weed-covered foundation of what might, had the over-sanguine capitalist not overshot the initial mark, have proved as fine a sea-side terrace on the South East Coast as the weary cockney eye could well hope to light upon, it would be including the fact that there is but one policeman to protect the lives and properties of the inhabitants and strangers of Torsington-on-Sea, by day and by night, and a town band (with a uniform) of five, of which two-fifths are, I was going to say "armed" with cymbals, triangle and with big and side drums, it would be more reasonable to suppose that Torsington-on-Sea had seen its day, and that what glories it ever had may be regarded as having departed with the vanished years.
Beyond the stock recreation afforded by the militarily-apparelled Town Band of five, whose répertoire appears to be confined to a sad and serious opening march, a rather lugubrious galop, and a couple of valses and a quick-step Polka, which evidently owe their origin to the genius of the Conductor, the entertainment offered by Torsington-on-Sea must be further sought for from a donkey-chair, the donkey attached to which has many a long year ago lost what it ever possessed in the shape of "spirit," a cast-off Nigger Minstrel, with a concertina that is somewhat out of order, and a lovely "public-house" tenor, who is heard only after dark, but with a voice so sweet and true in tone, that one wonders how it is that instead of thrilling the High Street of Torsington-on-Sea for possibly the few halfpence he picks up in that rather unappreciative thoroughfare, he is not simultaneously rushed at and eagerly caught up by the leading impressarios of all the continental opera-houses in Europe!
Then there is the daily arrival of the "coach," for such is the faded yellow omnibus styled, that meets the London train from Boxminster, which pulls up with a flourish at the "Three Golden Cups." There is seldom anything brought by this noteworthy conveyance, unless it be a package or parcel for Mr. DUNSTABLE, the one highly respectable tradesman in the town. DUNSTABLE's is the emporium par excellence where anything, from a patent drug down to the latest new novel, can be ordered down from Town. There is a tradition that old GEORGE THE THIRD, when passing through Torsington in the year 1793, stopped at DUNSTABLE's for some boot-laces, and, patting the grandfather of the present proprietor on the head, said, "What! what! none in stock! Then I think we must have some of these pretty curls instead." Anyhow, that is given as the reason for the style and title of "Dunstable's Royal Library and Reading Room," which it has enjoyed without dispute from the commencement of the present century to the present day.
I came here, as I said, by the advice of my medical adviser, to "pick up." How far Torsington-on-Sea has helped me to do this, I must deal with subsequently.